PayPal Recurring Payments vs MoonClerk Recurring Payments

Posted by Dodd Caldwell · Aug 22, 2013

A lot of small businesses need to accept recurring payments. Because PayPal is one of the oldest payment systems on the internet, these businesses often investigate using PayPal recurring payments. While in certain instances, that may be the best option, we do believe there are advantages to small businesses using MoonClerk’s recurring payments system.

Form Builder

With PayPal recurring payments, you can’t gather custom information that you may need from a customer or donor. You have to do all of that on your site and your servers. MoonClerk has a form builder built in so that you can ask for whatever information you need from your customers or donors. They can fill in this information while they checkout. All of that information and the payment and recurring plan information is in one place – your MoonClerk dashboard.

Transfers

If you do a quick Google search, you’ll probably find many people complaining that PayPal has “frozen” their accounts and is holding their funds. MoonClerk is built on top of Stripe. With Stripe, you always know you’ll receive your money 2 business days after a successful charge. Funds are automatically transferred to your bank account on a 2 day rolling basis. So, for example, if there is a successful charge on Tuesday, the funds will appear in your bank account on Thursday of that same week.

Usability

We built MoonClerk from the ground-up with small businesses in mind. Not only that, our focus is on providing a user experience that even non-techical people can easily use. We know it’s important to have a system that requires zero training for you or your staff. Because PayPal is one of the oldest payment systems on the internet and their main focus isn’t necessarily small businesses, their dashboard can be more difficult to use and harder to navigate.

Startup Costs

With PayPal recurring payments, if you want to accept recurring credit or debit card payments, the base monthly fee is either $20 or $30, depending on which plan you choose. You can accept PayPal recurring payments with their free account but only if the payer has a PayPal account. MoonClerk monthly fee starts at $15 and you can accept credit or debit card payments out of the gate.

Ads

If you are redirecting your customers to PayPal to check out, oftentimes PayPal will give popup ads to your own customers or donors to get them to sign up for PayPal branded credit cards or other features and services. These ads can confuse customers, take away from your brand, and reduce your conversion rates (the liklelihood someone who starts the process of checking out will actually end up paying.) MoonClerk’s checkout does not display ads or interrupt the checkout experience.

Data Portability

With PayPal recurring payments, if someone signs up for a recurring plan and later you want to transfer that customer or donor to another recurring payment system, you aren’t able to do so. Those customers or donors are locked into the PayPal recurring payments system. Because MoonClerk is built on top of Stripe, which allows you to transfer your data to other systems in a PCI compliant manner, you can move to a different recurring payment solution in the future if you want to.

Payer Controls

With PayPal recurring payments, your customers and donors can update their own billing info as well as cancel their own recurring plans. With MoonClerk, you can choose whether or not you want to allow your customers and donors to be able to carry out these two actions.

Payer Accounts

Even if you’ve upgraded to PayPal’s $20 plan, when your customers or donors are redirectd to the PayPal recurring payments page during the checkout process, PayPal will normally default to ask them to create a PayPal account. With this upgraded account, they can make recurring payments without a PayPal account, but it may not be immediately obvious. This can lead to confusion and can reduce conversion rates. Your customers or donors do not need any type of account to check out when you use MoonClerk.

Design

Unless you’ve upgraded to PayPal’s $30 plan, you don’t have much control over the design of the checkout experience. MoonClerk allows you to create unlimited design themes and style the checkout experience to match your site and brand.

Embedded Checkouts

If you want to embed the checkout experience on your site and accept credit and debit card payments with PayPal recurring payments, you’ll need to upgrade to their $30 plan. MoonClerk allows you to embed the checkout on your site from the get-go.

Customer Service

MoonClerk is a small startup with a passionate team. PayPal is an older company that is owned by a larger public company (Ebay.) We’d like to think we’re able to provide more personalized service to help you grow your business.